A few months after the U.S. Catholic bishops issued their 1986 letter on the U.S. economy and Catholic social teaching, Syracuse’s bishop championed the importance of unions and called for cooperation between unions and management.

“The economy should serve people and not the other way around,” Bishop Frank Harrison, the son of an early 1900s union activist, said at a public forum on the document.

“If there’s a loss of unions, then there’ll be no (balance) of power,” said Harrison, who led the diocese from 1977 to 1987 and died in 2004.

The Syracuse Diocese appears to have dismissed those sentiments and contradicted the teaching of the influential 1986 document, “Economic Justice for All,” by its decision not to renegotiate a union contract with six gravediggers who work at St. Agnes Cemetery in Syracuse and St. Mary’s Cemetery in DeWitt.

The workers learned last month the diocese plans to dissolve the nonprofit corporation that operates the cemeteries. Their contract ends Aug. 31. A diocesan official described the move as “streamlining” the operations of 13 cemeteries. The workers can reapply for their jobs, but there’s no guarantee they will be hired or paid their current salary, $15.75 an hour, plus health insurance and pension benefits.

An official claims that since the diocese is simply not renegotiating the contract, the move is “not union busting.” Maybe not literally, but it certainly is in spirit.

The move callously disregards concern for longtime, loyal workers who do back-breaking, sometimes grim work. It also illustrates a high-handed “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy.

Church leaders don’t hesitate to play the morality card on public policy issues — witness gay marriage, abortion, the health care bill, the deficit-reduction debate. The local diocese should apply that same moral compass here. Leaders should reverse their plan and renegotiate a union contract that treats these workers justly.

The Catholic Church has a long history of supporting workers’ rights. In his 1891 “Rerum Novarum” — considered the Magna Carta of Catholic social teaching and subtitled “On the Condition of Labor” — Pope Leo XIII blasted the exploitation of workers and supported trade unions and collective bargaining.

“Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages,” he wrote.

In 1986, U.S. bishops underscored the church’s support for unions. The document said justice calls for fair wages, adequate health care and pensions. It called on management to act ethically, urging “commitment to the public good and not simply the private good of their firms.”

In February, U.S. Catholic leaders expressed “support for and solidarity” with union workers during the Wisconsin Legislature’s efforts to strip the state’s public employee unions of collective bargaining rights.

A diocesan official in Syracuse said the decision about the gravediggers’ contract was in response to economic pressures. All employers are feeling the pinch of increasing benefit costs. Out of an annual budget of more than $9.5 million, it hardly seems six employees earning about $32,000 a year will break the diocesan bank.

Diocesan leaders should take to heart the words Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee wrote in addressing the Wisconsin Legislature earlier this year: “Hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.”